Accueil › Community › Forums › Technologies for mathematics › General Issues

"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart",

  • user warning: Table './jem/sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT COUNT(sid) AS count FROM sessions WHERE timestamp >= 1231487210 AND uid = 0 in /var/www/net.jem-thematic/site/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174.
  • user warning: Table './jem/sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT DISTINCT u.uid, u.name, s.timestamp FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.timestamp >= 1231487210 AND s.uid > 0 ORDER BY s.timestamp DESC in /var/www/net.jem-thematic/site/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174.
Soumis par sangwinc le jeu, 2007/11/22 - 01:14.

Gosh!

This has sparked a random thought: If answering a mathematics question is used as this test then we have a couple of tricky issues to resolve.

(1) a CAS is often much more accurate than a person with a complex "symbol-pushing" calculation.

So, what happens if the computer incorporates a CAS as an attempt to fool this test?

(2) people are nororiously poor at basic logical reasoning. Have a look at the "Wasson Selection test" as a prime example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

and with specific reference to mathematicians see the work of Matthew Inglis.

http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/mji/index.htm

I'm not trying to criticise this approach to reducing SPAM - I hope it works. It does raise interesting questions in my mind about what we are trying to achieve when we ask students similar questions as part of our assessments.....

Chris

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.jem-thematic.net/fr/trackback/491
‹ Should JEM install a WebWork server? Lessons learned ›

Chris, of course, a (not so)

Soumis par Caprotti, Olga le jeu, 2007/11/22 - 12:48.

Chris, of course, a (not so) smart spammer will be able to easily fool this. In fact, there are already attempts at cracking captcha's, but so far so good. Before we used it on the registration page, we used to get tens of fake registrations each day. Now we get none despite the triviality of the question. In fact, just asking to retype a string would also do it mainly because a generic spammer does not go through the trouble of trying to beat these tests.

My reasoning for choosing this trivial mathematical test, as apposed to the image-based ones, was that 

 1. hey, after all it is on the JEM portal
 2. but more seriously, it is more likely to be accessible for a standard screen reader.

And I do not think you ask your students to do sums of 1-digit numbers but you do assume that they know how to do it.

»